Jeremy’s Tophunder №56: Whiplash

9 min readMay 25, 2020

The final scene of Whiplash is perhaps the only scene that matters.

Well, sure, I suppose all the scenes matter, because you need all the backstory that leads up to and informs that final scene, but in terms of the message that the movie is trying to get you to walk away with, the final scene isn’t just the cherry on top — it might be the entire sundae.

For those of you who haven’t seen the movie and also don’t care about spoilers, here’s a basic rundown: Miles Teller plays Andrew Neimen, a first-year jazz drummer at a prestigious New York music conservatory, and J.K. Simmons plays Terence Fletcher, his verbally and physically abusive teacher and conductor. Over the first hour and a half of the movie, Fletcher openly berates and humiliates Andrew, to the point that Andrew suffers a nervous breakdown. He files an anonymous report that gets Fletcher fired, and Fletcher, seemingly unaware, invites Andrew to play with his professional band at a well-respected jazz festival. At the show, however, Fletcher reveals that he knows it was Andrew that got him fired, and levels his act of revenge — cueing the band to play a song that Andrew doesn’t know while Andrew struggles along in front of a sold-out crowd, including many influential people that could decide the success (or failure) of Andrew’s musical career. Andrew leaves the stage in humiliation, but quickly returns to deliver a virtuousic drumming performance over the next two songs, upstaging Fletcher and earning his respect.

The reason for Fletcher’s abrasive and abusive style is outlined in the scene where he invites Andrew to play with his new band, at a point in time where Andrew and the audience don’t know that Fletcher knows how everything went down. Fletcher is uncharacteristically candid and transparent about his methods and the reasons behind them. He says (and I’m paraphrasing) that his job wasn’t just to conduct a jazz ensemble, but to do whatever he could to unlock the potential of his students. He needed to push people further than they’ve ever been pushed before, because true genius and true prodigy will overcome any amount of pressure and adversity thrown at them. The worst thing that he could do as a teacher is to tell his students that something less than perfection is good enough. Fletcher then expresses regret that he never taught a true genius, a true prodigy, but he tried his best to extract that level of talent out of his students, and although his methods got him fired, he’s still not going to apologize to anyone for it.

With that knowledge in hand, I circle back to the movie’s final scene, and I try to imagine how Fletcher and Andrew feel at the end of that scene. Andrew, obviously, must feel fantastic. He took the worst that Fletcher threw at him (both metaphorically and literally) over the course of the weeks and months that the movie spans, but in the end, he upstaged Fletcher at Fletcher’s show, did everything short of banging out “Fuck you, Fletcher” in morse code on his drumset, and earned Fletcher’s respect in the process. For as far as Andrew is concerned, he won.

But what does Fletcher think? I have to imagine that he thinks he won, too. He leveled every ounce of self-confidence that this young kid had, and the kid is still here, not only just playing his heart out, but playing the best music he’s ever played in his life. The movie makes several references to Charlie Parker, a legendary saxophonist of the 30s and 40s, who famously received brutal treatment from his band leaders, up to and including having a symbal thrown at his head. This performance from Andrew is the closest Fletcher has come to having his own Charlie Parker story. In his eyes, the ends justify the means, and his methods, though controversial and unpopular, have worked.

And the scary part is, he might be right.

In critical analysis of the movie, one of the most common parallels draw is between Fletcher and R. Lee Ermey’s character from Full Metal Jacket, a similarly brutal and over-the-top abusive drill sergeant. The obvious difference is that Full Metal Jacket is a movie about the Vietnam War, not a movie about a jazz band. But does that distinction mean anything? Is this type of behavior somehow acceptable in an arena like war, but not in one like music? I’d argue that it’s either acceptable in both instances or acceptable in neither. And my biggest problem with the movie, on a personal level, is that while I really, really want to come down on the side of “this type of behavior should never be acceptable,” I can’t help consider the fact that, in some instances, it actually works.

I don’t have any personal stories of having teachers or coaches or bosses that acted the way Fletcher does. The coach who influenced me the most was my high school and club team swim coach, who was a sweet and kind old man who would never hurt a fly. When he tried to be a bit of a hard-ass (there was one instance where he cancelled practice early and kicked everyone out because we weren’t taking the drills seriously), it always came off as more forced than forceful. He was, for the most part, quiet and reserved, emphatic that everyone played by the rules, and his skill as a coach came simply from a lifetime of studying the science of swimming. And that’s the type of coaching that I always responded to. He pushed our limits by giving us physically taxing practices, and making it clear that if we backed off and half-assed our workout, the only person we were cheating was ourselves. In the four years that he was my coach, I’m not sure I ever heard him raise his voice beyond simply projecting across a room.

But I had friends on other teams, and I heard stories. There were teams that would line buckets up at the end of each lane, a signal during practices that you aren’t even allowed to get out of the pool to throw up. There were coaches that would hurl water bottles at swimmers who didn’t perform drills correctly. There were other coaches who would wait at the end of the lane, and if you lingered on the wall for too long, trying to get an extra breath while turning around, they would hit you, hard, with their clipboard. There was one coach, a tyrannical rage machine, who was known to challenge opposing coaches to fights in the parking lot after meets, and on one occasion, confronted a judge that had disqualified one of his swimmers so forcefully that the judge ended up in the pool and the coach had to be restrained and escorted out of the meet.

And these weren’t guys that were training professional swimmers, Olympians, or even people with realistic Olympic aspirations. For the most part, we were a bunch of high school kids, many of whom quit the sport as soon as high school ended. But despite that, many of them are still revered among the athletes they coached. Many of the swimmers I came up with to this day will say that they benefited from the abrasive coaching styles they experienced.

If we were able to talk to Andrew Neiman, I’d hazard a guess that he’d say he became a better musician because of Terence Fletcher. And I’m not sure how I feel about that. As a teacher and a camp counselor for my day job, I would get fired about seven seconds after treating any of my students the way Fletcher treated his, even if I wanted to, which I very certainly don’t. But his style *can* work. Sometimes. It’s not that his methods don’t work, it’s that they don’t work for everyone, and a lot of people respond outwardly negative to them. Whiplash sets this up as well, with one of Fletcher’s former students (who we hear about but never meet) committing suicide partially because of depression and anxiety that began when he was in Fletcher’s band.

The movie clearly outlines Fletcher to be a reprehensible person. His motivations are vaguely noble (trying to draw out every ounce of potential in his students), but it’s the way that he goes about it that is so troublesome. He genuinely believes the ends justify the means, and any broken people he leaves in his wake are a necessary sacrifice to the greater cause of unleashing true musical genius.

This is not okay. But sometimes it works. And when it does, it’s brilliant.

That, ultimately, is the hardest part of the movie to reconcile. I know how I’m objectively supposed to feel (that Fletcher’s style should never be tolerated and anyone who acts as he does deserves any consequences that stem from that), but I’m not sure that I actually feel that way.

The other part of the movie that I can’t quite wrap my head around is the way Andrew’s attitude progresses from (seemingly) quiet and shy to arrogant and condescending. It’s never made entirely clear whether that change comes about as a result of his time in Fletcher’s band, or if he always had that arrogance inside him, and it wasn’t until he started to find success that it came out. There’s a scene where he’s at a dinner party with his dad, talking about his musical career compared to the college football careers of a few of his peers, and another where he breaks up with his girlfriend because he wants to spend all of his time focused on music, and in both scenes, he just comes off like an absolute dick. Again, is this Fletcher’s fault? It’s unclear. The change in Andrew’s personality is certainly correlated with his exposure to Fletcher, and I certainly want to believe that it’s because of it, but that’s not necessarily the case. And it affects how you feel about Andrew, and how much sympathy you have for him as Fletcher puts him through the wringer. Obviously, even arrogant music students don’t deserve the type of verbal and physical abuse that Fletcher subjects Andrew to. That goes without saying. But the uncertainty about where that behavior shift comes from does give me a funny feeling as I watch the movie.

The reason I love Whiplash is -because- of those funny, uncertain feelings in my stomach. It presents a lot of difficult questions, none of which have perfectly clean answers. On top of that, it’s a technically beautiful movie — it’s shot in a relatively simple style, but the editing is magnificent. It won the Oscar for Best Editing, with director Damien Chazelle saying multiple times that his intention to have the movie edited as if it were an action movie, or like the boxing scenes in Raging Bull. The most important scenes are littered with fast cuts and close-ups, and the editing tells the story visually just as well as the dialogue tells the story narratively.

J.K. Simmons puts together one of the best acting performances of the last decade or more, and deservedly won every acting award under the sun. Miles Teller was also great, and remains one of the more underrated young actors in Hollywood. It didn’t really dive into any tertiary characters, partly by design (it’s a movie about singularly-focused obsessives) and partly because they didn’t need to. It’s another one of the reasons I think Whiplash is so good — because they made a spectacular movie without involving any bells and whistles. They just pointed a camera at the relationship between two people (and each of their relationships to music, I suppose), and then cut it together in a very interesting way. All in all, I think it’s one of the best movies of the last decade, and it’s my 56th-favorite movie of all time.

(For a refresher on the project, I introduced it in a Facebook Post on Day 1)

Here’s our progress on the list so far:

2. A Few Good Men

3. The Social Network

4. Dazed and Confused

6. The Fugitive

7. The Dark Knight

9. Saving Private Ryan

11. The Big Short

12. The Prestige

13. The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring

15. Skyfall